The current study is a diachronic study of the use of English loan words in Kurdish political discourse between 1993 and 2013, based on political articles in the Xebat newspaper. During this period a series of radical changes have occurred in socio-political domains in Kurdish society. The coincidence of these changes is expected to have caused a considerable number of borrowings in the representation of political notions. The motivation behind this study is the frequent use of English loan words in the Central Kurdish dialect as a consequence of the period of intense contact between Kurdish and English in the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 2003 to 2013. The data demonstrates that there is a dramatic increase in the frequency of use of English loan words most notably in 2005 and 2011 in response to political, economic, and cultural changes in Kurdish society and its increased contact with the English language. In contrast, the frequency of Arabic loan words reduced gradually after Arabic ceased being used as an official language for education, administration, and politics in Iraqi Kurdistan, in 1992.
The data shows that lexical transference is definitely the most common category of transference from English into the dialect as a consequence of the lexical needs of different political terminologies. The examination of semantic fields in this study indicates that English words have been borrowed across a range of political and general spheres. In particular, the results suggest that the high level of borrowing was caused by lexical gaps, such as in the lexis of administration. The Kurdish language had many gaps in this field because its users did not use their language in any administrative official structure until after 1992, when the new political processes necessarily required a great deal of new terminology relating to forming administrative and economic structures and, ultimately, a new government.
The study also explores the process of adaptation by which loan words from English are modified within the structure of the Central Kurdish dialect. The results indicates that the majority of these loan words are adapted to the phonological, orthographical and morphological structure of this dialect of the Kurdish language and that many have become productive elements within the dialect.